SPAM, Sendmail and favicon.ico

I’ve been working on site administration for the last couple of days. To reduce the volume of SPAM-bots registering on the message boards I installed a modification in early June. Unfortunately I neglected to test the modification adequately and it had the unintended consequence of stopping not only the SPAM-bots but also legitimate users. My apologies if this frustrated any of your attempts to join for the last couple of weeks. Please do try again, registrations are again possible. Oh, and the SPAM-bots appear to be held at bay. For now.

I’ve also been working on site email for the last couple nights. What a wonderful voyage of Sendmail discovery this is becoming. The site is able to send mail from the domain teletips.net. Yet I still need to figure out Masquerading so that the hostname of the MTA is removed from the sent mail. Then some aliases need to be configured. Much more to learn about Sendmail.

Lastly I’ve been trying to sort out an issue with that pesky little favicon.ico. I use mod_rewrite in Apache version 2.0.55 to serve all the requests using a single GIF. Here’s that rewrite rule:

RewriteRule .*favicon\.ico$ /images/favicon.ico [PT,NS]

This rule will convert any request which ends with favicon.ico to same filename in the /images directory. The PT flag means Pass Through; NS means No Sub-requests. Except the desired result, the little 16×16 icon in the location box and in bookmarks is not displayed on every page as I would like.